Guest, Hilary is probably referring to an article called the Hero of Tradition, originally published in Folklore, Vol 45 1934), or possibly to a book called The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama.

I don't have a copy of the latter, but you can find a reprint of the article in Alan Dundes, The Study of Folklore. My copy was published by Prentis Hall in 1964, although you could doubtless find it anthologised in quite a few other places.

Unfortunately it's so long since I read it that I can't help any further. However, here is a copy of Dundes' introduction in TSOF.

Like Olrik's article on epic laws, this essay by Fitzroy Richard Somerset, Fourth Baron Raglan, delineating a pattern of twenty-two elements underlying the life stories of a great number of folk heroes, is considered a classic. The essay was originally given as an address to the English Folklore Society in June 1934. In 1936, it was slightly revised to form the core of a book entitled The Hero: A Study in Tradition, Myth, and Drama.
Raglan applied the pattern, derived initially from the biography of Oedipus, to the stories of such heroes as Theseus, Moses, and King Arthur. Then each of these heroes was given a score based upon the number of elements he had in his biography. The striking similarity of the biographies of these heroes is demonstrated by the high scores of more than a dozen examples. From this patterned similarity, Raglan concluded that hero cycles lacked historicity. It could not be, reasoned Raglan, that every one of these heroes had lived identical lives. Even if an individual hero was historical, it was clear to Raglan that his life biography was not, it having been molded to fit the hero life-cycle pattern. According to Raglan, the pattern is not historical, but rather a reflection of a birth, initiation, and death ritual, possibly of a royal personage, who was also considered to be the incarnation of a god.
There were, prior to Raglan's study, many earlier attempts to discover the formulaic pattern of hero cycles. In 1864, Johann Georg von Hahn listed some of the various formulas he had noticed in folk narrative. In a way, this list might be considered a precursor of the tale type system developed by Antti Aarne in 1910. One of the formulas, number four, concerned the exposure of the newborn hero. Later, in Sagwissenschaftliche Studien, a theoretical work on folk narrative published in 1876, seven years after his death, von Hahn presents in tabular form a detailed outline of what he termed the Aryan Expulsion and Return Formula (Arische Aussetzungs- and Riickkehr-Formel). From the biographies of 14 heroes including Oedipus, von Hahn devised a set of 16 incidents which he divided into 4 basic groups: birth (1-3), youth (4-9), return (10-13), and additional events (14-16). The incidents are as follows:
1. The hero is of illegitimate birth.
2. His mother is the princess of the country.
3. His father is a god or a foreigner.
4. There are signs warning of his ascendance.
5. For this reason he is abandoned.
6. He is suckled by animals.
7. He is brought up by a childless shepherd couple.
8. He is a high-spirited youth.
9. He seeks service in a foreign country.
10. He returns victorious and goes back to the foreign land.
11. He slays his original persecutors, accedes to rule the country, and sets his mother free.
12. He founds cities.
13. The manner of his death is extraordinary.
14. He is reviled because of incest and he dies young.
15. He dies by an act of revenge at the hands of an insulted servant.
16. He murders his younger brother.
Five years later, in 1881, Alfred Nutt successfully applied von Hahn's scheme with minor modifications to fourteen examples of Celtic hero narratives, including the cycles of Finn, Cuchulain, and Arthur. Nutt, like von Hahn, presented his findings in a tabular fold-out.
Otto Rank's psychoanalytic study, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero, appeared in 1909; however, it contained references only to von Hahn's earlier 1864 work. In 1928, a Russian folklorist, Vladimir Propp, published his Morphology of the Folktale in which he proposed an analytic plot scheme for Russian fairy tales. (Fairy tales were defined as Aarne-Thompson Tale Types 300-749.) Propp's scheme has thirty-one elements, which he termed functions, and is perhaps the most complete account of the hero's "life history" as it appears in folktales.
There have also been some studies since Raglan's analysis first appeared. In 1949, Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces divided the hero's adventures into the formula: separation, initiation, and return. Campbell, however, does not analyze any one hero's life in its entirety. His pattern is a composite one which draws single incidents from the lives of many heroes. Campbell refers to Rank's study in one footnote, but he does not mention von Hahn, Propp, or Raglan.
A more recent study of the hero pattern is by Dutch folklorist Jan de Vries. De Vries, after referring to von Hahn and Raglan, but not to Rank, Propp, and Campbell, outlines a hero pattern of ten elements: (1) The hero is begotten; (2) He is born; (3) His youth is threatened; (4) He is brought up; (5) He often acquires invulnerability; (6) He fights with the dragon or other monster; (7) He wins a maiden, usually after over-coming great dangers; (8) He makes an expedition to the underworld; (9) He returns to the land from which he was once banished and conquers his enemies: (10) He dies.
The interested reader may wish to compare Raglan's pattern with some of the other hero studies. For von Hahn's early attempt to analyze form, see his Griechische and albanesische Marchen, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1864). The later expulsion and return fold-out faces page 340 in his Sagwissenschaftliche Studien (Jena, Ger., 1876). For Nutt's seldom cited study, see "The Aryan Expulsion-and-Return Formula in the Folk and Hero Tales of the Celts," The Folklore Record, Vol. 4 1881), 1-44. (The illustrative table faces page 42.) Rank's The Myth Of the Birth of the Hero is available in paperback (New York, 1959). Vladimir Propp's Morfologija skazki (Leningrad, 1928) was translated into English in 1958. Propp's Morphology of the Folktale was issued simultaneously during that year as Publication Ten of the Indiana University Research Center in Anthropology, Folklore, and Linguistics; s Part III of the International Journal of American Linguistics, Vol. 24 1958); and as Volume 9 of the Bibliographical and Special Series of he American Folklore Society. Joseph Campbell's study is also available in paperback, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (New York, 956), as is a translation of De Vries' 1959 study. For the De Vries pattern see Heroic Song and Heroic Legend (London, 1963), pp. 210–16. Since Raglan's book The Hero is also in paperback (New York, 956), the student of folklore can acquire an extensive yet inexpensive collection of hero studies for his personal library. For a valuable critique of the Raglan book, see William Bascom's "The Myth-Ritual Theory," Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 70 (1957), 103-14. For a convenient survey of hero pattern studies in which the schemes of von Hahn, Rank, Raglan, Campbell, and Propp are outlined and compared, see Archer Taylor, "The Biographical Pattern in Traditional Narrative," Journal of the Folklore Institute, Vol. 1 (1964), 114-29.